“My own state of Washington has an average salary bump of nearly $11,000 for a master’s degree — and more than half of our teachers get it. That’s more than $300 million every year that doesn’t help kids.” — Bill Gates, in a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/430516_teachers20.html
The summary below is reposted from Public Education Network and a summary of a post from Dropout Nation.
“America spends $5.7 billion on incarcerating juveniles, billions more on the entire juvenile justice system, and gets nothing but tragedy in return,” writes RiShawn Biddle on his Dropout Nation website. Just 45 percent of incarcerated juveniles spend six hours or more in school while they are in custody; only 51 percent of juvenile prisoners think they are getting a quality education. Just 12 percent of former juvenile prison inmates have ever graduated from high school (or received a GED). “And for poor black and Latino kids, juvenile justice is a particular misnomer,” writes Biddle. “For example, blacks make up 41 percent of all detention caseloads in juvenile delinquency cases (even though they account for 30 percent of all juvenile delinquency cases).” For school reformers, Biddle says addressing the problems of the juvenile justice system is almost as important in stemming the nation’s dropout crisis as addressing literacy. Yet reformers shy away from the topic, perhaps understandably: The juvenile justice system can be as complex as American public education; many of its defendants deserve some form of punishment for their crimes; and the majority of high school dropouts aren’t likely to have spent time in a juvenile courtroom. But the juvenile justice system is also scary: Its complex behavioral and psychological issues are harder to grapple with than issues of teacher quality (and most school reform activists have never gone through a juvenile court). But reformers must not look away: “Far too many kids are landing in court for problems that have as much to do with the failures of American public education as they do with bad parenting and a fraying civic society.”
Read more: http://dropoutnation.net/2010/11/23/dropout-nation-high-cost-juvenile-justice/
There are a lot of free sites out there with evaluation information… for current research on evaluation check out the excerpt below:
Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation is a peer-reviewed scholarly
journal freely accessible on the Internet at http://PAREonline.net PARE
has just published:
Unexpected Testing Practices Affecting English Language Learners and
Students with Disabilities under No Child Left Behind
Mark Fetler
The testing and accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind
Act impose sanctions on schools for not making adequate yearly progress
in student achievement. The sanctions may encourage inappropriate
practices intended to raise scores of low performing student subgroups.
This article considers evidence and consequences of misclassification of
English language learners as students with disabilities.
Questions? Contact:
Lawrence M. Rudner & William D. Schafer
Co-editors
coeditor@pareonline.net
Practical Assessment Research and Evaluation
My name is Nora and I am the founder of Murphy Educational Consulting. Murphy Educational Consulting is newly formed as of April, 2008 and as an organization on a path of discovery, trying to find our niche in Chicago, IL. But each of us on the team have been on our individual research and evaluation paths for many years.
I am interested in educational research and evaluation because teaching is how I began and it’s my passion. I started working at camps for children who were victims of abuse when I was 17. I didn’t know that this was the beginning of my career path and tried to major in Pre-Med Biology. But teaching kept calling me back and I graduated from Earlham College with an interdisciplinary major degree in Education (sociology, psychology & philosophy) and a minor in Biology. After graduation I spent a year teaching high school math in rural New Hampshire and two years teaching high school math & science in Washington DC.
I transferred my love of teaching and my enthusiasm for the outdoors to the non-profit sector where I was a program manager for four years with the Student Conservation Association (SCA). With SCA I started and grew an environmental stewardship program for high school students in Pittsburgh, PA. The program was transformative for the youth involved and for the land we served. While working with SCA, I was fortunate enough to be the point person for an external evaluation. And that was the turning point for me!
I realized that there were systematic ways to acollect data that would allow me to answer the questions that I had… about attendance, community perceptions, impact, etc. It was truly exciting. In fact I was so excited and energized, that it became clear that this was the next turn on my career path. I enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh’s Research Methodology program in the School of Education, with a concentration in Evaluation. And that’s how I came to love research and evaluation. I saw how much it changed me and my ability to run a successful program. I experienced first hand the power of data when making decisions about a program that I cared about deeply. I realized that data helped me better serve our students.
Have you had first hand experience research or evaluation and its impact on an organization? If so, please share!
-nora